Oruzgan Police Chief Matiullah Khan

A law unto himself, the 40-ish warlord Matiullah Khan is cagey, oozing bonhomie and danger in equal measure.

If he were in New York, Wall Street and the Mafia would compete for his services. He is the Jekyll and Hyde of the Afghan south who, by all accounts, might drown you in kindness, or in a well.

The widows of Tarin Kowt shower him in blessings for his weekly distribution of money and meat, oil and flour. A foreign official who needed to talk human rights, comes away intimidated – the way Matiullah twirls a Glock pistol throughout their meeting has something to do with it.

Oruzgan Police Chief Matiullah Khan

As well as carrying out his normal police duties, Oruzgan Police Chief, Matiullah Khan, also has a private army called the KAU, who secure the Tarin Kowt to Kandahar highway. Selected images available from www.fairfaxsyndication.com Photo: Kate Geraghty

In private, they curse MK, as he is known locally and by the Afghanistan cognoscenti. But on the air, he's celebrated in pop music. The man whose nearly every dollar is corruptly acquired gets to go on national TV as the crusading star in a public awareness campaign, in which he preaches against … the sin of corruption.

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He didn't go to school, but Matiullah is no illiterate – he knows and he understands. Occasionally, a look of bewilderment belies the essential rat-cunning in a man who can smell his way through a crisis. Invariably he emerges all rose petals, his rivals come out all thorns.

The evolution of Matiullah stuns those who are in the business of watching him. “Seriously, in 2003 this guy had the mind of a child,” a human rights professional says. “He was a typical greedy warlord, fighting for resources. He doesn't go after every penny now. He consults the elders, instead of dismissing them. He shows respect for the ones that he needs to respect and he has developed this incredible understanding of how to play politics.”

The Dutch, when they had troops here, refused to deal with him. But Matiullah beguiles the smartest generals in the Australian Defence Force and runs rings around Washington's finest. He scoops tens of millions of dollars from their budgets and they pat him on the back, sanitising his atrocious record in their refusal to acknowledge it, as they try to sell him in just two words – he is a "security provider", which means he can mobilise 3000 or more fighters before the Taliban gets out of bed.

Matiullah's formal title is provincial chief of police in Oruzgan. But that's a veil of official gossamer over a painstakingly crafted web of power and patronage that has catapulted a former taxi driver and field labourer to the top table in the nation. And it comes at a time when Afghanistan's President, Hamid Karzai, is positioning his cronies to hold on to their massive, ill-gotten gains as he nears the mandated end of his term of office.

Matiullah Khan is a Karzai crony – but he also is his own man.

Deconstructing how the unelected police chief has eclipsed tribal, warlord and political power, to the point that he is judged to have more control over his province than any other southern powerbroker, an international observer says: “Politically, MK is a very important non-government commander. He collaborates with the Australians and the Kabul government. But he relies on a weak central government to be able to do his own thing.”

It's late in the evening when we hear an explosion – then panic. Men with guns pour out of the compound, scattering every which way. They know Matiullah is about to return from one of his evening visits "to the airport" – their euphemism for his regular meetings with the Australians or Americans stationed in a sprawling military base that sits cheek-by-jowl with his compound. It transpires that a small device detonated as Matiullah's Humvee left the airport and it seems to be directed at the nearby home of a tribal elder, not at MK.

This is no big deal in the Oruzgan scheme of things, but there is room to cast Matiullah as the hero of the moment. He has his own radio station and in a case like this his guards become a Greek chorus. “He didn't do what other commanders would do – speed off in the opposite direction,” one of them reports breathlessly, once they have established he is safe. “No, MK jumped out and investigated the bombing himself.”

Outside the high walls of his compound, men sell caged partridges; inside, haughty peacocks strut freely. The police chief's compound is a sprawl of mud-walled buildings, a small mosque and an elaborate swimming pool.

It has a gym, a media centre and stylish guest accommodation. A network of closed-circuit TV cameras watches everything, feeding images to a big, segmented flat-screen TV tucked under the desk in Matiullah's first-floor office suite.

A new boys' school is being built out the back. Matiullah says it will specialise in English, computer studies and prepping students for university.

His desk clutter includes heavy pieces of carved green marble, one shaped as a map of Afghanistan; plaques of appreciation from the Australian Federal Police and a US Navy SEAL team; a boxed medal awarded by the Kabul government; and in pride of place at the front edge of the desk, a boxed boomerang – a gift from Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, formerly head of the Australian Defence Force.

As we sit to talk, Matiullah removes a spittoon from the desktop.

His reputation is that he will kill at will and people are afraid of him. An Afghan analyst who has observed him at close quarters compartmentalises his critique, on one hand damning MK's human rights record but also admiring what he describes as a rare capacity, for an Afghan, to take the fight to the Taliban.

“He is a very brave man and he fights the Taliban with honour – in the south Afghanistan meaning of this word,” he says. “There are only a couple of people in all of the south who can stand up to the insurgents and who the Taliban actually fear. Abdul Raziq, the Kandahar police chief, is one; MK is the other. Matiullah faces his enemy with real courage and psychology. He is prepared like few others when he goes into battle.”

Haji Obaidullah Barakzai, an MP described as an Matiullah puppet, says: “If he has killed people, it is always in support of the government – there might have been some mistakes, but the foreign troops make mistakes too. And MK is never accused of raiding people's homes, of robbery or sexual abuse.”

These days he leaves the compound only in a heavily armoured Humvee – with armed pick-ups fore and aft. Matiullah knows, the Taliban know and his tribal rivals know that such is the power concentrated in him that his elimination would create an extraordinary and dangerous vacuum as Afghanistan transitions to the next uncertain phase of its history.

Matiullah is consolidating and the ledger splits between what he calls his "good works" and allegations from his legion of critics of sins ranging from petty theft to acts of sheer bastardry.

Having effectively established his own shadow government, he unilaterally embarks on the jobs he feels need to be done, mocking the more cumbersome planning approach of the provincial and national bureaucracy and even of his Australian backers.

He complains that the Australians sat in their bunkers “doing nothing, while I was clearing the Baluchi Valley”. And he snipes at the Australian-led Provincial Reconstruction Team – “I do things; they talk about doing them”.

One of the elders, Daru Khan Khaksar, interrupts his note-taking on our meeting to cast Matiullah as their saviour. “His role is more important than that of the Afghan National Army or of anyone else,” he says. “We travel freely because he imposed security where others couldn't.”

The manner in which Matiullah saw off one of his last serious competitors, former provincial governor Omar Sherzad is a textbook example of how to win in tribal politics. Sherzad was a threat to Matiullah's cash flow and his support for merit-based appointments clashed with MK's belief in having his own men where he needed them.

His predecessor as police chief lasted only a few months because after 17 tribal elders in a row were assassinated, the Tarin Kowt establishment was in such fear for their lives that 15 of the most powerful figures were happy to be rounded up and ferried to the capital to lobby Karzai for a new appointment. And as soon as Matiullah was appointed provincial police chief he was able to blend his private militia, the KAU, with the state-funded police service.

His key rivals have been eliminated: the Taliban took down Jan Mohammad Khan; a friendly-fire incident involving Australian forces saw off Rozi Khan, his strongest competitor for the police job; and Rozi Khan's son, who became a vocal critic, died in a bizarre murder.

The point at which Matiullah could draw breath and look seriously at consolidation ahead of next year's tectonic shifting of foreign forces and of President Karzai, was the assassination of his uncle and mentor Jan Mohammad Khan.

There were two reasons why he could then begin to position himself as the modern warlord. One, in the paranoid tradition of the tribes, JMK had always blocked the rise of Matiullah – for the simple reason that even as his protege, JMK perceived in him a threat.

And two, with the gravitas of the post of police chief, he could start sanitising his reputation, papering over the brutality that was a hallmark of JMK's rule and of which he, Matiullah, reputedly was the chief enforcer. “His uncle's hitman,” as one analyst parsed Matiullah's early career.

He managed to outsmart the wily JMK, who believed that control of government appointments was the key to power. Matiullah bypassed all that, getting his paws into the biggest new honey pot in the land – the heady mix of foreign funds and military might.

JMK had his own very personal relationship with Karzai and so he was able to stymie earlier efforts to install Matiullah as police chief. But when the final push came in 2011, JMK was dead and the Australians and had become Matiullah's new cheer squad.

If Matiullah was unrestrained after the death of JMK, Hamid Karzai was nobbled, because he had no one to do his bidding in a province that was an essential element in his political cobweb. “With JMK gone, there was no one apart from Matiullah that Karzai could count on locally,” said a close observer of local power plays. “JMK's sunset was MK's sunrise.”

There is a spectral quality to the man – especially if chanced upon in the evening light, as he steps out in the all-white robes of a Muslim who has made the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca. The beard is cropped; the pate is balding and the nose … well, it is monumental. He speaks quietly.

Born in Tarin Kowt in the early 1970s, Matiullah attributes his lack of an education to "house-to-house" disruption during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Until he was 19, he was displaced by war to his family's village north of the town, where he worked the fields. Did the family grow opium poppy? “Mostly wheat,” he responds, massaging the sole of his right foot.

But something is not right. A staple in accounts of Matiullah's life has been tutelage by his warlord uncle, the brutal and vengeful Jan Mohammad Khan.

Haji Abdul Manan, who oversees six security checkpoints in the Chambark Valley, remembers JMK being on the front line in the 1990s Mujahideen Wars – “he was always there … and fearless.”

Further out, at even more remote Shahidi Hassas, a tribal elder recalls: “Even when Matiullah Khan was a child, before he had a beard, he fought with JMK.”

But ask about the garrulous uncle and the nephew becomes monosyllabic, casting their relationship in remote terms – JMK was too busy being a leader for all to be looking out for his nephew, and then the Taliban threw him in jail.

To hear Matiullah now, the critical formative influence in his life was today's President, Hamid Karzai. Don't believe any of that talk about him being JMK's henchman, Matiullah says.

The first armed combat he volunteers is an encounter with the Taliban in the mountains between Tarin Kowt and Dihrawud after the 9/11 attacks on the US. He and a small group led by Karzai had collected an airdrop of American weapons – AK47 and PK machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. But as they hauled the booty back towards Tarin Kowt, where they planned to launch an attack on the provincial government centre, they came under attack – and the Taliban got away with all the US-supplied arms.

“So we had to liberate Tarin Kowt with the few AK-47s we had,” he says. “It wasn't bloody. We attacked in the morning, it was over by afternoon – two Talibs died in a traffic accident as they tried to escape.”

The only association he acknowledges with JMK is during the collapse of the Taliban late in 2001. “We [himself and Karzai] came down from the mountains, and after liberating Tarin Kowt we went to Kandahar and negotiated with the Taliban for JMK's release from prison.”

He makes it sound as though it was Karzai doing his old friend JMK a favour and the young Matiullah seemingly was just along for the ride. He volunteers that he and JMK did join up to fight the Taliban, but only once and just for a few weeks in neighbouring Zabul province. At all other times, he insists, they were doing different things or were in different parts of the country.

Here, MK would have us believe that already he was evolving as the human-rights-conscious, Jeffersonian democrat that he hasn't quite become. “We were in the mountains, but it wasn't about being a mujahideen fighter,” he insists. “We were thinking about liberating Afghanistan; about helping it to develop as a nation, with a national police service and military.”

The appeal for many Afghans of a police chief with deep pockets is his can-do approach to everything, circumventing funding crises and planning delays. If a village needs a mosque for prayers, he builds one; a bridge to cross a river, he'll get moving right away. A culvert gets washed away, and Matiullah moves in men, machines and money.

He has built more than 70 mosques across the province, some simple mud-walled constructions, others more elaborate.

Discussing what he calls his "good works", Matiullah becomes almost sentimental. “I have to listen to the people and to fulfill their expectations,” he says. “I have to close the gap between the people and their government and help them to understand that the police serve them. I feel great responsibility. I want to win the hearts and minds of the people because it makes them happier.

“So I build a mosque for people who need one. I've lost count of the number of wells I drill for people with no water. I spend $80,000 to send 600 students for study in Kabul. I take care of 280 girls in the school at the back of my compound”, and he closes with an impressive figure – 15,000 – the number of locals he claims live off the salaries he pays.

He set up his Eslahi Shura, or reform council, in response to local frustration at the shortcomings of the formal justice system.

It is comprised of about 100 mullahs, intellectuals, elders and other notables who resolve disputes – all entirely informal, except that Matiullah uses the power of his police office to order all parties to appear. The shura gets rave reviews in a town in which a judge in the formal justice system declined to take a case brought by a murder victim's brother against one of Matiullah's commanders, because he was afraid of the police chief.

Sceptical Afghans say it's all a calculated personal investment in consolidating the power of his Popalzai tribe and at the same time eclipsing fellow tribesmen who might claim the mantle of leadership. Perhaps…

Women seem to intrigue Matiullah, in a way that sets him apart from the average Afghan male. In a culture that is cruel to widows, he goes out of his way to look after them with his Thursday handouts.

Women generally are unwelcome in public life, but he supported all the successful female candidates at the 2010 national elections. And while chatting with Fairfax Media photographer Kate Geraghty, he plucked a stray strand of fair hair from her shoulder – and studies it with an almost childlike curiosity, before dropping it with a rubbing of his fingertips.

Even before we arrive in Tarin Kowt, his treatment of his wives is held up to us as proof of a progressive outlook. The father of 12 children – eight boys, four girls – he is proud of the running of his home. Unlike many polygamous Muslims, he has his three wives living under the one roof. “And everyone gets on well together,” he boasts.

Hilla Achekzai, a female senator for the province, tells us: “He seems to support democracy – you see it in how his home is run and how the women of his family are allowed to dress. He supports run-away girls; treats them like his own daughters. This kind of person can't be bad behind closed doors…” – and here she pauses to find the right qualification – “…but no one knows his secrets, do they?”

If Matiullah's good works are his Jekyll persona, then a measure of his Hyde side is the fear induced in people who speak about him. “If he understands that I've told you this, he'll kill me,” a source tells Fairfax Media, without a hint of exaggeration. A UN official observed him to be “a ruthless individual who'll use whatever is at his disposal”.

Among "whatever" is a catalogue of charges by human rights and other analysts: summary executions and torture, arbitrary detentions and extortion, and all of it funded through drug running and the extraction of massive highway security tolls.

More spectacularly, Matiullah gets away with it all, because of the real or implied blessings that his highway-security racket derives from his ties to the Australian and American military machines in southern Afghanistan.

Much of the local fear of Matiullah Khan derives from his past and his copper's can-do approach to law and order. “You hear of the response to insurgency attacks,” says a local Afghan who observes security operations closely. “His guys will go to the area, pull half a dozen people from the surrounding villages and shoot them, with no regard for who actually did what. There is a consistency in several of the cases…”

The fear element in the Matiullah narrative emanates in particular from events after the fall of the Taliban in the Baluchi Valley, a stronghold of the pro-Taliban Ghilzai tribe north of Tarin Kowt.

As explained by an analyst who has conducted interviews in the area: “JMK and MK went house to house, killing people.

“These days MK is so strong that people are afraid to tell their stories openly, but I spoke with the victims. About a year after the fall of the Taliban, a few shots were fired from one of the villages, so JMK and MK started rounding up people.

“One man told me how his son was made to lie on the ground – and then they drove a truck over his head.”

The source then turns to the town of Mirabad: “It was the same there – maybe 700 people have been killed in multiple, brutal killings. That's why Mirabad became a home to the Taliban again; it was more about revenge on the tribal establishment than it was about loving the Taliban.

“Half of them arguably were Taliban – the rest were sympathisers or maybe just relatives of sympathisers. But a good 200 were innocent – wrong place, wrong time kind of thing.”

Martine Van Bijlert, an analyst with the Afghanistan Analysts' Network and a former Dutch diplomat, writes chillingly of a prominent Taliban commander, Haji Pay Mohammad, in Mirabad. After he surrendered, the new Kabul government granted him permission to return to his home, she writes, but he was dragged from his home by JMK's gang and killed. His body, like that of several of his comrades, was left in the town square for several days – a reminder to others.

Matiullah is hailed at one centre after another as the essential element in the local security equation. And he is rated as more important than any parliament in Kabul because the people believe he keeps them safe.

For many ordinary Oruzganis, he is the last line of defence between them and a return to the brutal warlord madness of the early 1990s or to the straitjacketed Taliban years that followed.

At Chinartu, in the south of the province, local officials sing the praises of Matiullah – “thanks to his goodness” the road was opened after the centre had been under Taliban siege for more than six years. “This is the first year that our children can go to school,” one said.

And at Mirabad the story is the same. Locals say they were so fearful of the Taliban that they knocked back an Australian offer of good money to work at repairing roads; now Matiullah had fixed the security problem properly and they were happy to do the road works for a fraction of what the Australians had offered. “But we're all alive,” says elder Haji Habibullah.

Even Matiullah's long-term rival Nabi Khan speaks up. “People's appreciation of MK is genuine because he opened the roads,” he says. “I had to abandon the Chora road after 40 of my men were killed trying to secure it. MK did what I couldn't do … six governors and police chiefs before him couldn't do it either. So people say, however much money he has, may God give him 10 times more.”

Another of these tribal leaders, Malik Amir Jan, says Matiullah earns their respect through his community work. He finished with a rush: “As a symbol of our love and respect, we cannot speak his name; instead, we call him 'haji mashar' – chief.”

At Dihrawud, district police chief Haji Namatullah explains how he is under orders from Matiullah not to rob the people – “he said 'come to me for money if you have a problem – do not extort it from the people.' And I know too well that he'll punish me if I commit a crime.

So more than a decade later, how does Matiullah Khan judge progress? Is the provincial chief of police in Oruzgan a part of the problem or the solution?

He talks about an encounter with an 85-year-old man who has never left his village near Sawar, in Oruzgan's remote Charchino district. “What can we expect from such people in supporting or playing a role in governing this country,” he asks. “That old man has never seen Tarin Kowt. He doesn't know what his rights are – how do you introduce democracy to him?

"It's very difficult – the people are ignorant and they don't understand this democracy. We need time, lots of time, but gradually we're working for better governance.”

A question that exercises many a mind in Tarin Kowt these days is the fate of Matiullah Khan next year, after the foreigners clear out and Hamid Karzai can no longer be called on to send reinforcements.

This is the context in which Matiullah's appointment as police chief is seen as part of the new Karzai crony network that is intended to survive beyond the end of his presidency, because if they cannot hold the south, what's to come of the Karzai cabal and their huge holdings?

“With Karzai out, the Popalzai lose a huge chunk of their political power and that could mean the removal or transfer out of the province of MK,” says a prominent local who asks not to be named. “At the moment he is king – if people wanted to go against him now, who could they turn to? For the Popalzai, it's winner takes all.”

Juma Gul Heimat, the former police chief, uses bowls of cashews, sugared almonds and other nibbles to map tribal conflict in Oruzgan. “There are big areas that MK does not control and because his Popalzai people have fought with everyone else it will be difficult for him to assert himself as a powerbroker.

"Even if Kabul backs him, people will want to test him. When the foreigners leave he will be nothing. He was a nobody till the coalition came along – he was working the fields, driving a taxi. The millions of dollars he has all came from the coalition.”

A warning by the former police chief that "MK will lose his power, lose his men" resonates with a throwaway line by one of Matiullah's militiamen during the convoy run from Tarin Kowt to Kandahar. “We do this for the money,” he says as the armoured Toyota barrels down the highway. “It's not about loyalty to MK.”

And though Matiullah and his rival Nabi Khan have recently come to some sort of accommodation, the latter seems to think that all bets might be off come next year's elections. “Then we'll see who is president and who is police chief,” he says before making it all sound very personal – “we'll see how much power he has and how much power I have.

"MK has brought good benefits for his tribe but he has done nothing for the rest of us.

“The balance between the tribes is not maintained – and without that balance there can be no security.”

Walking Fairfax Media through on-going sectarian violence in Khas Oruzgan, a community leader ponders the fate of Matiullah in the absence of the foreign forces: “What is he if there are no Americans, no Australians? The people will stand against him – he'll be nothing. Nobody in the other tribes – Achekzai, Noorzai or Barakzai – likes him and people work for him only to earn a living.

“The day the foreigners leave, his own men will kill him … They'll be lining up to take Matiullah down.”